To pay his tuition fees, he had a job in a clothing store serving Qalandiya refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. He was working there on Monday, 29 February, when two Israeli soldiers drove into the camp, reportedly by mistake.

In her 1969 book On Death and Dying, Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined five major emotional stages that people tend to go through while coping with the death or loss of a loved one: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Over three months have passed since the killing of his son Bahaa, but Muhammad Alayan has not been able to experience any of them. The 60-year-old lawyer has been too immersed in the struggle to recover the body of his slain son to actually contemplate his loss.

“More than a hundred days have gone and I couldn’t sit with my wife and three (remaining) children at one table together and realize that there is an empty chair no longer occupied by Bahaa,” Muhammad Alayan told me. “We have had no time to discuss his absence because our entire lives have revolved around getting him back.”

When Muhannad Halabi stabbed two Israeli men to death and injured a woman and a baby in Jerusalem’s Old City, he started what many Palestinians have called the “intifada of the knives.”

Halabi was shot and killed by Israeli police during the attack in early October last year and the 19-year-old law student was branded a “terrorist” by the media. His parents, however, have a sharply different view: they regard Muhannad as a hero.

“I will always be proud that my son sacrificed his life for the liberation of his homeland,” said his mother Suhair.

In his final posting on Facebook, Muhannad expressed deepanger about the incursions of Israeli settlers into the compound around al-Aqsa mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites. He had just watched a video of a Palestinian woman being arrested by Israeli police at al-Aqsa.

“Do not make me a number you will remember today and forget tomorrow,” wrote Bahaa Alayan in a Facebook post titled “The ten commandments of a martyr.”

That post, which Bahaa wrote in December 2014, was a trenchant critique of how Palestinian media, political organizations and society treat martyrs and their legacies. Bahaa did not want martyrs to become numbers or their images be emblazoned on posters; he did not want the legacies of martyrs to be co-opted by factions.

He did not want them to be idolized or turned into icons, for he belongs to a generation that has revolted against these ideas. Nor did he want the media to exhaust the mothers of martyrs with questions that only seek to draw pity and sympathy. Continue reading “How a scout leader became a martyr”→